#AWW 2019 Ashleigh Young

• Author:  Ashleigh Young
  
• Title: Can You Tolerate This?
  
• Published: 2016
  
• Genre: essays
• List of Challenges 2019
• Monthly plan
• #AWW2019
• @AusWomenWriters

• Trivia: Shortlist Rathbones Folio Prize 2019
• Trivia:  Yale University Windham-Campbell prize 2017
  
• Trivia: Ockham New Zealand Book Award (NF)  2017
• Trivia: Adam Foundation Prize Creative Writing 2017

Conclusion:

Bones

1. This would not have been my choice to start an essay collection.
2. Topic was not a good hook...not funny or emotional
3. …just a bit strange.

Witches

1. Story took me back to the carefree summer days on a beach.
2. I can’t remember the last time
3. …I jumped into the ocean….how sad is that?

The Te Kūiti Underground

1. Absolutely enchanting…author’s memories of her father.
2. “…he became in my eyes more and more eccentric,
3. …and I became  more narrow-minded.”

Postie

1. Just a story that leaves the reader
2. with a message from an eccentric French postman:
3. “ …how wonderful it is if we just keep going
4. …a simple stumbling block…can change
5. the entire story of out lives and deaths.”
6. #SmileOnMyFace

On Any Walk

1. Once I start a walk…I never turn back.
2. I just remember how far I’ve come
3. .How much distance would be wasted
4. …if I turn back?
5. Once I’m home …the coffee tastes so special!
6. Ashleigh Young will…
7. #NeverGiveUp

Big Red

1. I’m speechless….
2. We are introduced tp author’s family
3. …mom, dad and 2 brothers.
4. Ashleigh Young is an amazing talent
5. …..one of the BEST essays.

Window Seat

1. We’ve all been there
2. …on a plane with a talkative passenger next to us.
3. Only this passenger….could she be and angel?
4. #Spooky

Black Dog Book

1. What you possess…you loose.
2. Happy family dog story….but sometimes 
3. Mom has to make the difficult decision
4. …and call the vet.
5. #HardToSayGoodbye

Katherine Would Approve

1. Anecdotes about the period when
2. Ashleigh Young was director of 
3. Katherine Mansfield Birthplace House
4. …in Wellington, New Zealand.
5. #Job

Wolfman

1. What to do when a harmless comment stings?
2. #ThinkBeforeYouSpeak

Can You Tolerate This?

1. After reading this essay I had to close my Kindle
2. take off my glasses and close my eyes.
3. #PowerfulWriting
4. …one of the BEST essays

Seas of Trees

1. Eye-opener about a disturbing
2. …social trend in Japan: hikikomori.
3. Creative young people becoming modern-day hermits.
4. #PTSS

Bikram’s Knee

1. If you are determined to find a way back to strength
2. nothing is unfix-able.
3. This is a very, very personal essay about Ashleigh’s
4. Struggle to accept the awkwardness of her body.
5. She keeps waiting on the  gym bench, elbows on her knees
6. head in her hand
7. .…waiting for transformation.
8. #Yoga #Running
9. ….one of the BEST essays.

Unveiling

1. The author visits a Maori ritual
2. …unveiling a headstone of a family member.
3. She will write a story to
4. accompany the photographs her friend is taking.

On Breathing

1. So funny about a simple decision
2. ,,,author decides to breath noisily
3. …when she feels puffed 
4. during a taxing bike ride.
5. #Quirky

On Going Away

1. Insightful look at relationships…
2. Going away and then coming back together
3. …this surge of
4. anger and relief is toxic.
5. Solution:  compress it into one moment
6. …like stepping into a manhole.
7. A sharp, pure accident with a beginning and an end.
8. #Insightful

Anemone

1. Heartwrenching…to try to reach into the past
2. and hold on to some one…
3. …to try and stop time.
4. #Depression

Lark

1. Heartwarming observations and anecdotes
2. about a woman who decides
3. …to write a book  about her life.
4. The story is clearly referring to
5. …Ashleigh Young’s mother.
6. #Hysterical
7. ...one of the BEST essays.

Last thoughts:

1. Extremely well-written set of essays
2. …in quiet, elegant joy-to-read prose.
3. External circumstances
4. …family, job, body shape or where you live..
5. cannot determine your happiness.
6. Ashleigh Young shows us
7. happiness depends on what we are given.
8. This a book  best read ‘slowly’…
9. I was not ready to say goodbye…
10. ..to Ashleigh Young’s beautiful writing.
11. I’m anxiously waiting for her next book!
12. #MustRead

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#AWW 2019 Fiona Wright

• Author: Fiona Wright
• Title: Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger (10 essays)
  
• Published: 2015
  
• List of Challenges 2019
• Monthly reading plan
• #AWW2019  @AusWomenWriters
• Trivia: Winner of the Kibble Literary Award 2016 
• Winner 2016 Non-Fiction Book Award in the Queensland Literary Awards.
• Shortlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize

Introduction:

1. Wright examines her own anorexia and the significance of hunger.
2. She  writes frankly and movingly about a
3. …difficult and very personal subject.
4. She provides insights into her reading,
5. …travels and her interactions with others.
6. In several essays Wright relates
7. …her experience to that of characters.
8. In novels  there are characters who starve themselves:
9. For Love Alone by Christina Stead,
10. Cloudstreet by Tim Winton and
11. The Bluebird Cafe by Carmel Bird.

In Colombo    …malnutrition, she misses it

1. First sentence: I’ll always remember the
2. …particular intensity that malnutrition brings on,
3. …I know that I miss it still.
4. Reaction:  Hunger keeps the author separate from
5. the rituals of society not only in Colombo.
6. 70% impressions of the writer’s apprenticeship at a newspaper
7. ….30% about her illness.

In Hospital   …sickest

1. First Sentence: At my sickest, a lover once folded a
2. blanket over my shoulderblade before curling against my back to sleep.
3. Reaction: Hunger is a mediator, it stands between the author and the world. Hunger is addictive. Hunger is support, it is scaffolding. Hunger became my safest state.
4. 100%….very powerful, personal and disturbing.

In Berlin     …interesting facts

1. First sentence: I felt smaller in Berlin than I ever had before;
2. the Northern Germans are, by and large, a big-boned people,
3. …the shanks of their legs are particularly impressive.
4. Reaction:  The author visits a labour camp, Sachsenhausen.
5. The body never forgets starvation. 
6. Sad…the author bought food to give her
7. …pantry shelves an appearance of normality.
8. “I didn’t choose my hunger. That no one ever does.”
9. Wright describes returning to a family she
10. …lived with during her studies 10 years ago.
11. She had been well then.
12. She did not know what lay ahead.

In Miniature  …presenting a paradox

1. First sentence: It seems a strange place to start writing about the miniature,
2. but I want to begin on the internet, because I found there,
3. for a time, a thing I could hardly have conceived would have existed,
4. a community of illness, specifically for the kinds of illnesses that
5. …we often keep silent and hidden within ourselves.
6. Reaction: Breathtakingly  beautiful…how Fiona Wright sees her
7. …fascination with miniature reflected in her illness.
8. This essay was poetic!

In Increments   …sickness personified “gnawing”

1. I’ll never know the point where my physical illness
2. ..gave way to something different,
3. something more complex, but more and more I think
4. …now that hunger was always with me, always
5. …gnawing away somewhere in me, and my illness
6. …just allowed this hunger to assert itself in the only
7. …way that could possibly have been acceptable to me.

In Books I    …analogy in books

1. The year that I first became ill, when my physical condition first developed,
2. …was the first year that I studied Australian Literature.

In Books II    …analogy in books

1. There are books I have had with me in
2. …hospital waiting rooms that I can never re-read without re-reading, too,
3. …the traces that they carry of the spaces that I took them into.

In Group  ….mother vs daughter

1. There are some conversation that you shouldn’t have with your mother,
2. especially if you are a poet, and especially if you are a
3. …poet four months into you third stint of group therapy.

In Passing   …sad news

1. I received the news digitally, in a text
2. …from my old housemate, Kat.
   

In Hindsight  …looking back

1. I resisted, for a long time, reading any anorexia memoirs,
2. …even though I’d been reading about
3. ..the condition in fiction and textbooks.
   

Conclusion:

1. The cover of Fiona Wright’s book keeps catching my eye.
2. What kind of story is behind those eyes.
3. Fiona Wright (born 1983) is an Australian poet and critic.
4. Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays in Hunger (2015)
5. is a collection of ten essays that detail the author’s
6. own experience with anorexia.
7. The longest essay is ‘In Group’
8. …the shortest is ‘In Passing’.
9. The best?  I loved them all.
10. I wrote down a few words about the first few essays.
11. Each one  draws me in with the first sentence.
12. After reading one essay
13. ….I have to get up and do something else
14. …I must let my thoughts settle.
15. Fiona Wright has shared her life
16. …stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron.
17. The more Fiona thinks about her body
18. the more she knows it is no longer her own.
19. Her body tries to fold up at the first sign of danger
20. …as if disappearing into a shell.
21. #MustRead